Zach Braff Has A Big Laugh

By Joel Stein

When we sit down at a Manhattan bar, Zach Braff tells the waitress that we'll have two beers. This I didn't know about. On our way out, he gives a smooth Jersey nod to a table of college-age women. His laugh is so loud, explosive and startlingly self-assured that it's normally heard only from aliens pretending to be human. Braff exudes more confidence than Donald Rumsfeld in 2003.

The lead in NBC's hit hospital sitcom Scrubs had the cockiness to write and star in his directorial debut, Garden State (which opens July 28). The film is a love song to suburban New Jersey that is so smart and touching, Bruce Springsteen might be able to retire soon. "I kind of wanted it to suck. I wanted it to be a big, noble failure," says Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence, who will have Braff, 29, direct some episodes this season. "I was extremely jealous. I might have to put myself on the show as an actor to even the playing field."

For years Braff kept meticulous notebooks of overheard stories, personal experiences, friends' lives and local newspaper clippings (thus saving from being lost to history the tale of the Jersey hotel workers who drilled holes in the walls to watch guests have sex). He used them in a romantic comedy about a young, depressed Hollywood actor who comes home to his mother's funeral, confronts his father and meets a woman. He wrote the script in 2000 while working as a waiter in Los Angeles after graduating from Northwestern, where he majored in film. "Almost everyone had passed on it," he says of his script. "They all said, 'Make it a three-actstructure movie.' If I submitted it to a screenwriting class, I would have failed. It should have been harder for the main characters to start liking each other. And I said, 'Why can't they like each other from the beginning?'"

Eventually Braff got Danny DeVito's Jersey Films to co-produce it, partly by trading on the fact that the company had never made a film about its eponymous state. Then he got Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Ian Holm, Jean Smart and Method Man to be in it. At Sundance he sold it to Miramax and Fox Searchlight for a $5 million distribution deal. "He's a very confident guy. To be a director, that's what you have to do," says Portman, 23. "He demands confidence in others. You just have to talk back."

As preparation, Braff had Portman watch one of his favorite films, Harold and Maude. Like that movie, Garden State quickly establishes an off-kilter tone, using odd pacing and such surrealistic touches as the giant pet cemetery in Portman's character's backyard to create a marijuana-like haze between the main character and his surroundings. "I love stuff that's totally realistic, then dips across the line," he says. "Sometimes I crossed the line."

Braff says he picked up storytelling from his father, a litigator who teaches at Rutgers University School of Law and did some local acting, and mom, a therapist. "We went out to dinner, and we never cared where we ate. My family was all about storytelling and making each other laugh," he says of his parents before their divorce. Braff's two elder brothers have also become writers. Joshua wrote a novel about Jersey, The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green, which will come out in September. And Adam was hired with Zach to co-write an adaptation of the kids' book Andrew Henry's Meadow, about a boy who escapes suburbia by building a Utopia in the trees. "We describe it as Brazil for kids," says Braff. It's hard not to suspect he really wants to call it Citizen Kane for kids.

The only time a tiny fissure appears in the immensely likable Braff's confidence is when he reveals, as he has in each interview about the film, that he had always pictured Portman for the role but never dreamed he could land her. After the phrase "someone like Natalie Portman" was mentioned for the hundredth time, a producer sent her agent the script as a long shot.

"Zach tells everyone he wrote the part for me, and he's so lying. The No. 1 clue is that my character is not a Jew," Portman says. "He's just saying it because I'm the one who agreed to do the movie. I have met other actresses who have told me they turned it down." The guy is so cocky, he even fakes modesty.